Who Needs Premium Economy Software?

Premium Economy Software

You’ve probably heard of budget travel. No fills, no service. As many features taken out as possible but with a price tag to match.

Now maybe the retiree might find this appealing but this might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Imagine that you’re attending an important meeting and you cannot afford to be late. Imagine that it’s a long plane trip and you’re going to need all the rest and comfort for that important meeting once you touch down. Now imagine that once you’re done, you’ll be hopping back on the way back home, not miss your child’s big soccer game.

Suddenly, budget travel does not seem all that appealing.

Customers That Want Better

Some customers are just like the ones I mention. They understand that their software is an important part of their business, not just getting from point A to B. They are looking for that extra added features, better performance or better customization that would give them an edge against their competition. Save them money and even make them money. They need the support and service of a business consultant. These customers are looking for premium economy software.

Think about the full cycle costing.

Full cycle costing is looking at all the cost and benefits more than just looking at the price tag.

Take for example, a large seat pitch that would allow someone to sleep better. This might save the cost of a hotel room. Extra $150. Medical cost associated with stiff back. $400. Missing that important meeting due to a flight delay $5000.

For software, there are 3 main areas you need to think about.

1 Development Execution

When do you need this software? What is the result of not delivering on time? How many man hours is your team going to invest in this?

2 Poor Workflow (Software That Does Not Fit Right)

Poor workflow fits is a like a suit that does not fit properly. Imagine a software that did not have a particular feature and you had to use 2 different software packages. Like an excel and email. That simple task of taking 1 record and entering into an email might cost hours of lost productivity just copying and pasting, put that into mistakes and extra Human Resource cost.

3 Future Customization Cost

Remember windows 98 or other slow websites. Like Friendster

This essentially re-affirms Jim Scheinman‘s point #4 (“don’t experiment with the newest stuff”). Friendster’s front-end developer adopted a table-less “pure CSS” approach that (IMHO) was too early. Browser support for CSS positioning was poor, best practices were yet to be established, and the relevant engineers didn’t have prior real-world experience implementing the technology. This made it slow and high effort to implement features and functionality. This also significantly reduced the audience as the site was now essentially incompatible with browsers used by 30-40% of the internet audience at that time. Increasing deployment time was compounding the existing problem of being slow to introduce badly needed new functionality.

After one year, you find your software lacks some functionality. You go back but you find out that the code is not robust, changing things is difficult and it might cost 2 to 3 times against what software would have cost on the Yii framework. You might need to re-do the entire code which is expensive.